Here are the tributes:

You’ll note that some are babies. And, in fact, in a wrenching scene one of the youngest of them dies a brutal death. And the protagonist Katniss Everdine gives the child funeral rites even though she is a competitor.

The kindness in the midst of the brutality causes a riot in the dead girl’s district.

It is a lot to take in for an adult. For a child? Well.

Not all children should see this movie. In fact, children under 10 – 12 shouldn’t see the movie no matter their constitutions. There is some good reasoning here as to why.

One of my older children (14) is especially sensitive and won’t be seeing the movie either until it’s on a small screen, the movie can be stopped, and the issues explained. Also, the books must be read first.

My twelve year old daughter did see the movie. She’d read all the books and didn’t seem to grasp the horror of forcing children to fight each other to the death.

She sat curled into my arms at a couple points during the movie. Seeing is believing, evidently.

While the filmmakers did their best to minimize the blood and gore, the graphic nature of kids breaking necks, stabbing and slashing, poisoning, etc. disturbs all but the most detached.

The books are actually more graphic and distressing. As I shared in my previous post, I was so sickened by the premise that I put the book down.

Many books deal with children as protagonists in life and death situations — Lord of the Rings (in the books the Hobbits were coming of age), Ender’s Game (6 year old protagonist), Black Beauty, Lord of the Flies, etc.

Children read these books, evaluate them, and process them on a different level. Their lack of life experience is a help here. In books, one imagines what one has experienced and apply it to the reading.

The movie gives no such room. The violence is there to see.

There is great risk watching the movie Hunger Games of becoming the voyeur watching the reality game. The American audience, especially, weaned on Survivor, the Bachelor, etc., can be immune to the human difficulty and suffering.

Children are used as pawns and killed while, as a friend stated, trying to hold on to their humanity. This is a subject only the more mature can process. Beware of robbing your child’s innocence with this movie.

If you doubt your child’s ability to handle it, wait.

[More about the cultural relevance in the next installment.]

Lots of people hate Obama. Most of them hated him and his moronic ideology before he got elected the first time.

Many more people loved Obama; they were enthralled and captivated by him. They thought he was different. He was special.

Back in the day, I had a photoshopped picture with Britney Spears screaming girl fans except I exchanged the picture of Britney on their pink T-shirts for a picture of  Obama.

The Obama fangirls didn’t like this picture.

Everyone loved Obama and the ones who weren’t totally sure thought something like this, “well, everybody is doing it, so he must be okay. He’s gotta be better than the boring old boyfriend.”

He turned out to not be better. Depending on one’s point of view, he turned out to be much worse and for a variety of reasons.

Jim Geraghty has a very insightful piece explaining the mind of an Obama voter  that is must-read. Here’s an excerpt:

Monday I spoke to a smart political mind who had been watching focus groups of wavering Obama voters in swing states, and he said that one word that those voters kept coming back to, again and again, was “naïve.”  (The term was to describe the president, not themselves.) Those who voted for Obama won’t call him stupid, and certainly don’t accept that he’s evil. But they have seen grandiose promises on the stimulus fail to materialize, Obamacare touted as the answer to all their health care needs and turn out to be nothing of the sort, pledges of amazing imminent advances in alternative energy, and so on. He seemed to think that reaching out to the Iranians would lead to a change in the regime’s behavior and attitudes. He was surprised to learn that shovel-ready projects were not, in fact, shovel-ready. He was surprised to learn that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean energy projects wouldn’t great enormous numbers of new jobs. He’s surprised that his past housing policies haven’t helped struggling homeowners like he promised.  He’ssurprised that his signature health care policy has become as controversial as it has. The “recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized.” When a woman says her semiconductor engineer husband can’t find a job, Obama says he’s surprised to hear it, because “he often hears business leaders in that field talk of a scarcity of skilled workers.”

Naive. The screaming girls weren’t naive. Oh no. The new boyfriend was naive.

The part that bothers me about this mentality is that people who externally project their stupidity tend to not learn from their mistakes.

Still, it’s wise to think of all the divorced people you know.  Few admit they screwed up. Most, to their dying day, will call their ex evil or wrong and that they, the innocent victim, was horribly deceived. Conned, even.

One Twitter acquaintance says this: RT @heatpacker:  The #GOP must speak #truth about the 2008 Obama Con. Voters must not be insulted for credulity, but portrayed as victims.

A nation of gooey-eyed victims.

Well, for Republicans to win, I don’t think that blaming Obama voters for their vapidity will go a long ways to convincing them to vote for someone else. How many beaten wives stay with their abusive mates out of sheer stubbornness? He is too good! You just don’t understand.

America can’t afford that nonsense. So, those voters who saw the Obama fraud for what he was would do well to use great restraint and reinforce the (hopefully) better decision of the deceived masses this time around.

The best thing to do for conned Obama voters? Feel sorry for them. They know not what they did.

Very interesting (but rather wrong) piece about the younger generations blaming the Boomers by Walter Russell Read by way of Monty at Ace. The comments are far more insightful.

Says Alex Scipio:

Sorry, Prof. Mead, but you have widely missed the mark.

When the 18-yr olds, the lead Boomers, were given the vote in 1972 and shortly began their careers in office, the Debt was $400B. For this America had purchased and/or conquered a continent, invented air and space travel, modern manufacturing, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals, invented and commercialized computers and telecommunications, and won every war we had tried to win.

The Boomers? Have invented nothing. Have discovered nothing.Have generated wealth only in bubbles based on intenet (also invented by their parents as ARPANet) fantasy.

Sure – Boomers are in everywhere pretending that they have anything good to say or any worthwhile thoughts. But take a look around. The world of the past 50 years is a steady decline of cultural and societal courtesy, manner, education, volunteering, education, exploration, education (did I say education?).

Even better, John Lynch concludes:

I’m Gen X, and I’ve been stuck listening to Boomer [folderol] my whole life.

Now the Boomers are all doom and gloom. That’s not because the world is really all that much worse off than it’s ever been. It’s just the impending death of the Boomer generation. They’ve mistaken their own decline for that of the nation and the world.

The Boomer generation has always thought that nothing happened until they arrived (see that beautiful piece of propaganda, Mad Men) and are equally convinced that nothing will happen once they are gone. All the environmental millennialism has its origin in the Boomers. From The Population Bomb to Global Warming they’ve persistently believed that not only are they a social force but a cosmic one as well.

The world will survive their passing. I’m already enjoying the lack of 60s music on the radio and the blessed silence about Woodstock and the Vietnam War. My generation has accomplished far more, with less noise, and we won our war.

History will not be kind.

A couple thoughts:

1. I blame the parents of these indulged brats. The WWII/Great Depression parents, in an attempt to shelter their children from all difficulty, brought up a bratty, superficial, spoiled generation.

2. Learn the lesson. Children today have even more wealth and good fortune (for a while) than the Boomers started out with. The OWS-ers are astonished and dismayed because their Boomer parents sold them the same tripe they believe about themselves. So these little snowflakes are upset that the world is not interested in their brand of special.

Discipline, hard work, responsibility, right and wrong, common sense, diligence, fidelity, and humility don’t go over big but they’re characteristics that win over the long-term.

Overindulgence makes for rotten grown-ups.

I have come to the conclusion that all abortion, legal or illegal, is a back-alley business. Yesterday, I saw a liberal decrying regulations on abortion clinics. You know, outrageous things like medical care for the mother and cleanliness in the operating room.

Today, research (a rigorous meta-analysis) confirms the self-evident: Women who have abortions have worse psychological outcomes than women who have their babies. LifeNews has the story:

A new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry by leading American researcher Dr. Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University finds women who have an abortion face almost double the risk of mental health problems as women who have their baby.

Coleman’s study is based on an analysis of 22 separate studies which, in total, examine the pregnancy experiences of 877,000 women, with 163,831 women having an abortion. The study also indicated abortion accounts for one in ten of every adverse mental health issue women face as a whole.

“Results indicate quite consistently that abortion is associated with moderate to highly increased risks of psychological problems subsequent to the procedure,” the study says. “Overall, the results revealed that women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81 percent increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10 percent of the incidence of mental health problems were shown to be directly attributable to abortion.”

The peer-reviewed study indicated abortion was linked with a 34 percent chance of anxiety disorders, and 37 percent higher possibility of depression, a more than double risk of alcohol abuse (110 percent), a three times greater risk of marijuana use (220 percent), and 155 percent greater risk of trying to commit suicide.

When compared to unintended pregnancy delivered women had a 55% increased risk of experiencing any mental health problem.

Dr. Coleman said she conducted the study “to produce an unbiased analysis of the best available evidence addressing abortion as one risk factor among many others that may increase the likelihood of mental health problems. There are in fact some real risks associated with abortion that should be shared with women as they are counseled prior to an abortion.”

What I have seen in practice would confirm this theory. The death of a baby causes a woman much grief. The death of a baby at her own hands? Well.

Abortion advocates don’t like to talk about how women are victimized by abortions. They talk about the woman’s mental health as one of the reasons to have an abortion–the assumption being that the mother experiences great relief from being out from under, as President Obama calls babies, the burden.

The truth is usually quite the opposite. Because of this willful disregard for women, women often find themselves stricken and alone after an abortion. They are trapped by their own guilt. Often, they are trapped by the man or family member who forced her to have the abortion.

But don’t talk about this.

This abortion research was published in the most prestigious psychiatry journal. And yet, it will be either ignored or diminished by the very lucrative abortion industry.

Women are lied to about the risks routinely. An abortion risks damaging their fertility, harming their physical health and changing them forever emotionally. Abortion-lovers do a great disservice to women twice-over by abandoning them after enduring the abortion.

Meanwhile, women who work in Crisis Pregnancy centers know all about the risks to a woman’s mental health. They’re the ones doing the post-abortion group therapy — groups that are never empty.

The abortion business is anti-women. It’s a dirty business, with dirty little secrets.

I’m thinking back to Paul Newman as a younger man. He was hotness until the day he died. Pure yum. He raced cars. He walked like a badass. He had the smirk. But he didn’t strike me as jerk. Cool Hand Luke….manly, right? Or what about Clint Eastwood at all ages? Or Johnny Cash? Manly, hot, badness.

And, as a woman, are you gonna get a certain type based on how they look? I mean, does the square jaw, broad face, dense muscles get you a worse kind of man…like Sandra Bullock‘s Jesse James? But Tiger Woods isn’t all that broad-faced guy…so no guarantees. And what about John Edwards? He’s the classic fem guy…I wouldn’t count on a feminine face.

Women like what they like. In the Western world, it might not mean survival but it might mean satisfaction.

More here

A “dark side” to the internet suggests a strong link between time spent surfing the web and depression, say psychologists.
British scientists found that the longer people spent online, the less likely they were to be happy.

A small group of the worst affected individuals were both depressed and addicted.

But it was not clear whether using the internet causes mental health problems, or whether people with mental health problems are drawn to the internet.

More work is needed to answer this “chicken and egg” question, say the researchers.

Well, if a person tends to be a solitary person, he might enjoy hanging on the internet. But then, he does self-reinforcing things, like look at porn, and gets stuck behind his desk even more. Then, he is kinda addicted..he exercises less, gets less natural sunlight, interacts with real people less and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Or, the person starts depressed and the internet doesn’t force human interaction or exertion.

I don’t think there is one cause here, but it does seem to be a risk for introverted people.

I’ve emailed Bellow asking him about the fact-checking process for “Going Rogue.” Getting an on-the-record confirmation that, for example, Harper Collins reviewed the medical records proving Palin’s multiple medical stories (including corrected hospital records by her own account) would be a useful piece of information. Since it appears that the McCain campaign knew nothing of these rumors, and indeed, by some accounts, nothing even of Bristol’s pregnancy, it would be reassuring to know that someone somewhere has actually sought proof of some of Palin’s wildest embellishments or total fantasies.

Sullivan does produce some useful psychological insight into stalkers and conspiracy theorists. They aren’t motivated by facts or reality. And, in fact, engaging them is pure folly as their aims are not truth, but connection to their obsession. The problem for Andrew, is that Sarah Palin is just so far away and detached from him. If only he could be with her. If only he could be her.

Alas, some things are not to be. I hope the Palins have good bodyguards.

So Amy Alkon, falls into the former category and wishes to banish bad babies having bad days. In that case, I’d like to banish bad old people, bad NSA people, bad flight attendants, and really, pretty much 90% of my fellow passengers on airplanes. Why? Because they suck.

Most air travelers are tired, angry, irritable or sick. Most airplanes are now bovine-packed breeding grounds of festering frustration. It’s likely I’ll catch a cold or a bad attitude, or more likely both, on an airplane.

It’s pretty to complain about the errant toddler but that would take the focus off the menopausal chick screaming at her husband a couple flights ago or the mean old lady swearing in Spanish at anyone who touched her bag in the overhead bin. You know, the nice, civilized adult people who ride planes. Don’t forget the guy who drops his nervous fart that just won’t go away and from which there is no escape.

Air travel used to be a nicer, more refined experience. People dressed up, and sat a couple people to a row. Flights weren’t overbooked. Planes were new. They fed you. The stewardesses actually seemed to like people and aim to please.

Now, you get more respect and less hassle on a city bus and that is no exaggeration. At least you can get on a bus without having to throw out your bottle of water and being frisked and x-rayed down to your undies. Plane travel is demeaning and annoying.

But I’m not going to blame only the environment, the procedures, the staff and the experience. I’ll blame the passengers, too.

There are two sorts of passengers: The ones who travel all the time and the ones who travel for special jaunts. The regular travelers suffer the special jaunt travelers. The regular travelers have a routine. They know how things work. Then there are those who bumble around, pack wrong, take forever through security, seem lost in space and generally monkey up the works for everyone.

I’d like to set aside special planes for the casual travelers.

So, here’s my list of people I don’t want anywhere near the travel experience: NSA staff, flight attendants, casual travelers, crotchety old ladies, farting men, screaming middle aged couples and really anyone else unwilling to stoically endure a two hour trip.

Fact is, as much as I’ve traveled, I’ve seen far more annoying adults than annoying toddlers. Toddlers get a bad rap, but it’s mostly undeserved. Far more often, kids and babies are a welcome respite from the hell promulgated from some acting-out adult.

And I eagerly await the day when Amy has a kid of her own. She’ll then be praying to the please-don’t-cry, please-don’t-cry, please-don’t-cry god and making a trip she may not want to, but will have to make. She’ll have the pleasure of the apprehensive stares and the judgmental glances. She’ll get to change a diaper in a 2×2 foot closet and try to entertain her child when the flight is three hours delayed on a runway with no food and water and no hope of escape. Yeah, that’s heaven, right there.

Air travel is no fun. No reason to single out toddlers. The whole experience is usually pretty awful.

H/T Instapundit

Why won’t President Obama put his hand over his heart, a sign of devotion, during the National Anthem? Even better, why does President Obama protect the family jewels (symbolically) by interlacing his fingers in front of his crotch when the National Anthem plays?

Does the President feel threatened and therefore feels the need to be self-protective during the National Anthem? Is he just bored and trying to figure out what to do with his hands–anything, but show devotion to his country?

It seems to me that President Obama is not comfortable around any patriotic displays. In fact, it seems that any shows of patriotism make him feel defensive. He seems to want to protect himself from the assault.

Update:

@Techaskew on Twitter noted that it could be just another narcissistic display–that President Obama is taking the National Anthem in as if it’s being played for him. Like he’s the perpetual birthday boy and being sung to every time there’s a big event.

Oh blech. I think that might be more wretch-inducing.

Updated again:

“L’etat, ces’t moi”

“I got your salute right here.”

Via Lucianne

The New York Time’s takes on the “overachieving” parents’ angst via Instapundit:

Parental yelling today may be partly a releasing of stress for multitasking, overachieving adults, parenting experts say.

“Yelling is done when parents feel irritable and anxious,” said Harold S. Koplewicz, the founder of the New York University Child Study Center. “It can be as simple as ‘I’m overwhelmed, I’m running late for work, I had a fight with my wife, I have a project due — and my son left his homework upstairs.’ ”

Numerous studies exist on the effect of corporal punishment on children. A new one came out just last month. Led by a researcher at Duke University’s Center for Child and Family Policy, the study concluded that spanking children when they are very young (1-year-old) can slow their intellectual development and lead to aggressive behavior as they grow older. But there is far less data on the more common habit of shouting and screaming in families.

Something jumps out at me: as the child of parents who viewed spanking as their Christian duty (spare the rod and all that), I can assure the researchers it is not like yelling is new. Yelling happened in the bad old days, too.

Re: parenting styles: Kids are resilient. An occasional “losing it” moment isn’t going to scar a child for life.

However, when a parent creates an environment where he or she is consistently out of control, where he chooses to respond to a child in anger, rather than reason, the child realizes the child is in control. Someone owns the buttons. Either, the parent is controlling the nuke button or the kid is. I would suggest that the kid will grow increasingly insecure when he can’t count on mom or dad to be in charge. He doesn’t want to be in charge. He wants to relax into well-known boundaries.

So, parents need to keep an eternal guard on their emotions. Some kids are very smart and manipulative and get a kick out of mom and dad being as easy as a wind-up toy. Teenage boys seem to especially enjoy spinning old mom like a top. The parent teaches disrespect for both himself and the child.

I hate to burst the bubble of New Agey parenting types who scream at their kids for not eating the lentils, you’re no better than the out-of-control spankers of yore. The key is who is in charge? Screaming just declares your impotence just as reckless spanking indicated a desire for immediate control without thought. In both cases, it’s the easy way.

Parenting is brutally difficult. It is a constant personal challenge. The big picture: What is right for the kid? is lost in a personal haze of fatigue, hormones, blood sugar, emotional misery or whatever. Every parent realizes his personal limitations almost immediately–a crying, inconsolable infant is often the first test of many.

So yellers need to knock it off and grow up. Someone has to be the parent. It should be the parent.